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Columbia partners with edX to expand online education

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Provost John Coatsworth announced Columbia's new partnership with edX, a not-for-profit platform for massive open online courses on Thursday. History professor Eric Foner will teach the first course through the partnership.

Columbia may soon expand its online learning opportunities, thanks to the University’s partnership with edX, announced Thursday afternoon.

Though various Columbia professors have taught massive open online courses through other platforms, including Coursera and Fathom, no University-wide partnerships had been established before Thursday’s announcement.

edX is a nonprofit online learning platform co-founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 that offers free and open online courses. edX currently works with 33 colleges and universities, including 18 international institutions, allowing the platform to offer courses in other languages.

“We have, for a long time, wanted to partner with edX,” Soulaymane Kachani, the special assistant to the provost for online education, said. “This conversation started almost two years ago, at the end of the spring of 2012.”

“We were very interested in the not-for-profit model of edX, and the edX community they have been able to foster and shape over the past two years in operation,” Kachani said.

Part of the collaboration will also include research on long-distance learning, similar to what has been done at Harvard and MIT, in order to understand how to better format live lectures to an online audience.

Kachani said that edX will provide “goldmines of data … to do research to learn how we can improve teaching on campus.”

Both edX and Columbia are optimistic about the benefits of the new partnership.

“We are absolutely honored to have Columbia working with us,” Agarwal said.